Ashkenazi or Mizrahim—Who Won the Israeli Election?
This question—who won the Israeli election—has fascinated observers around the world, who are sitting on the edge of their seats. Israel’s election processes to Western, centrist, and mainline Christian audiences might seem incomprehensible; we assume that the party or candidate with the most seats automatically wins the government.
Unfortunately, no clear winner can be declared immediately because Israel’s parliamentary system requires 61 votes to form a coalition. Incumbent Ashkenazi Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu garnered 53 seats while Mizrahim Gati Eisenkot won 48 seats in Israel’s 120-member Knesset. The process of forming a government will have to be decided through the legislated decisions of President Isaac Herzog.
While the race for Prime Minister is tight, the most striking aspect of the election is the unprecedented and history-making nature of the candidates.
Incumbent Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has held office for a total of nineteen non-consecutive years. Born in Tel Aviv, he is nonetheless an Israeli with eastern European roots. For many Western onlookers, he represents the right-wing old guard, a landed elite, an aristocratic class of Israelis.
By contrast, Eisenkot—though also born in Israel—is described as a Mizrahi Jew, meaning a Jew whose family originates from the Middle East or North Africa. In, fact, his mother was born in Casablanca, and his father was born in Marrakesh in Morrocco.
Like many Mizrahi Jews, Eisenkot came from countries where the history, identity, and political experiences were formed in Arab and Muslim-majority countries distinguishing them as “Arab Jews” rather than “European Jews.” The fact that Eisenkot is a serious potential prime ministerial candidate represents an important development in Israeli political history.
The following discussion of the Mizrahi Jews and their positions and effects on Israeli culture and politics comes from my previous post (to view, click below) on the history and significance of Mizrahi Jews.
One of the biggest forces shaping Israeli politics almost never appears in Western coverage: Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews. These are the descendants of Jewish communities from Arab and Muslim countries. Their families lived continuously in places like Iraq, Yemen, and Morocco for over 2,500 years—dating back to the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE and the Roman destruction of 70 CE. They now make up more than half of Israel’s Jewish population. Their long experience in the Arab Middle East, followed by life in Israel, has steadily pulled the country’s politics away from the peace plans many Westerners still favor and away from the universal ideals that often shape Western thinking about the conflict.
The decisive turning point came in 1977 with the Mahapakh—the election that brought Menachem Begin and Likud to power. Working-class Mizrahi voters from the development towns, built to house the large wave of immigrants from Arab lands after 1948, played a central role in defeating the long-dominant Ashkenazi (European Jews) Labor Party. Ever since, Mizrahi Jews have been decisive players in Israeli politics—something most Western observers miss. This helps explain the strong right-wing and nationalist tilt in the polls: Mizrahi support for the right often runs 20–25 points higher than among Ashkenazim. Many also back Shas, the Mizrahi religious party that emphasizes tradition, practical social support, and the fight against discrimination.
Today Jews of Mizrahi or mixed Mizrahi-Sephardi (Spanish) background form a plurality—and often a majority—of Israeli Jews. More than a third of Jewish babies born now come from mixed Ashkenazi-Mizrahi families. Mizrahim are not politically monolithic; some favor deeper engagement with the Arab world. But their numbers and cultural weight have pushed Israel toward a harder-headed realism shaped by family memories of persecution and expulsion rather than Western liberal hopes for peace. That is one reason the West so often fails to grasp the Mizrahi position.
You see the shift in top posts across government, the military, and culture. Leaders such as David Levy—born in Morocco, raised in tent camps, a former laborer who became Foreign Minister—and Miri Regev, daughter of Moroccan immigrants and a blunt Likud minister who challenges the old European-style cultural elite, embody the change. Their outlook is regional: strength, honor, and survival.
The same outlook drives Israel’s fiercest internal debates, including the battles over judicial reform. Western media often frames these as a simple fight for “democracy.” On the ground it looks different: a post-1977 majority, heavily Mizrahi, trying to make institutions long seen as dominated by the old Ashkenazi elite more accountable to the public that elects the government.
The gap with much of Western discourse begins with fundamentally different historical lenses. The central argument advanced by Palestinian leaders and their advocates is that Palestinians are being forced to pay the price for the creation of Israel because of the sins of the West—the Holocaust. This claim treats the Holocaust as the reason Israel exists, and Western support for the Jewish state as a form of atonement.
Progressive circles, mainline Christian institutions, and pro-Palestinian voices (including theologians such as Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb) repeat and amplify this narrative. It is an effective strategy. What they incorrectly conclude is that any Western support for Israel must be “blind” or unconditional, driven solely by that guilt. By framing Israel’s existence as the product of Holocaust guilt, they convert Western moral discomfort into political support for the Palestinian cause.
Yet the premise is false. The Zionist movement began in the 1880s, when the land in question was still part of the Ottoman Empire. There was no “Palestine,” and the Holocaust was still more than fifty years away. Israel was not created to atone for Europe’s crimes; it was the return of a people to its historic homeland.
Mizrahim, who form the backbone of Israel’s security-first majority, carry a different wound.
They suffered at the hands of the Arab and Muslim world, not Nazi Germany.
After 1948, roughly 850,000 to 900,000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee ancient communities in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere. Israel absorbed the vast majority. Arab states took in almost none.
Yemeni Jews rescued from Yemen and flown to Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet
This history undercuts the claim that Israelis are merely “White European colonial settlers” oppressing indigenous Palestinians. A large share of Israeli Jews are themselves indigenous Middle Eastern refugees. Europe and progressives feel no Holocaust guilt toward them—the Holocaust in Europe that they were not part of. The pre-1948 “Arab Section” described in Matti Friedman’s Spies of No Country makes the point vividly: early Jewish agents could gather intelligence inside Arab lines precisely because they looked and spoke like the people around them—Arabic-speaking, culturally Middle Eastern Jews. Shaped by these local roots, successive wars, and repeated failures in peace talks, this part of the population remains deeply skeptical of both Arab diplomatic intentions and Western-imposed frameworks.
Israeli Jews had absorbed their own refugees—their people expelled from Arab lands—because that is what a people does. Watching Arab governments refuse the same for Palestinian refugees after 1948 and 1967, they concluded the camps were a deliberate strategy: keep the refugees unsettled and use the “right of return” as a weapon against Israel.
That difference showed up at the negotiating table. Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008 approached talks with a Western deal-making mindset. Many accounts still blame Israeli stubbornness or settlements. Yet even very generous proposals—Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank and Gaza with land swaps and shared control in parts of Jerusalem, and Olmert’s still more far-reaching 2008 map—were rejected. Palestinian leaders offered no serious counterproposals. The Second Intifada and its suicide bombings followed Camp David. To the Mizrahi-influenced majority, this confirmed that the core issue was never borders or settlements, but the refusal to accept a Jewish state in any borders.
The Abraham Accords followed a different model: strength and realism, not large concessions. Arab states engaged a confident, militarily strong Israel that played by regional rules. Mizrahi Jews—especially those of Moroccan background who spoke Arabic—played a quiet but important role. Shared language, music, customs, and cultural fluency helped. Arab hosts visibly warmed to Israeli delegations that included Arabic-speaking Jews; the ceremonies themselves featured Arabic prominently. The result was real normalization with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. The same approach has not worked with Palestinian leadership, which remains locked in rejectionism.
What many in the West call “Israel behaving badly” is often simply a Middle Eastern country doing what it must to survive in a tough neighborhood. The Mizrahi consensus refuses to gamble the nation’s existence on progressive ideals imported from afar. They know the price of trusting too easily. In the end this reflects a deeper divide: a Mizrahi-shaped realism that puts the survival of a particular people first, versus the more universal ideals popular in much of the West.
The Israeli elections have brought a new and unprecedented focus to the context described above. Never before has a Mizrahi Jew been elected as a potential Israeli Prime Minister…and we Westerners are still sitting on the edge of our seats.
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